The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968)

Screen: 'Charge of the Light Brigade':Vanessa Redgrave and John Gielgud in Cast Hemmings and Trevor Howard Also Star

By VINCENT CANBY, HOWARD THOMPSON.

Published: October 7, 1968

TONY RICHARDSON'S "The Charge of the Light Brigade" comes very close to suffering the fate of the mule who, caught equidistant between two bales of hay, starved to death.

But, about half-way through, the movie that hasn't been able to make up its mind whether to be a political cartoon or a social history opts for the single dimensional approach. The result, photographed at large expense in England and Turkey, is a scathing, cryptic, sometimes brilliantly detailed caricature, which, I'm sure, is quite accurate as far as it goes but, like Mauldin's Willie and Joe, it has lost a bit of relevance.

It is also—I suspect—a movie that will baffle anyone whose knowledge of the Crimean disaster is limited to dimly remembered passages from the works of Alfred Lord Tennyson, the poet, and Michael Curtiz, the director (of the 1936 Hollywood version starring Errol Flynn).

In 1854 Britain had been more or less at peace since the Battle of Waterloo, 39 years earlier. Its military establishment was still dominated by the ideas of the formidable old Duke of Wellington (who had died in 1852) and it was commanded by peers who purchased their commissions under a system in which men with the biggest property stakes in the country were most trusted to lead its armies.

When Russia, seeking to enlarge its influence in the Mediterranean, invaded Turkey, popular opinion forced Britain to send an expeditionary army to fight the Czar in the Crimea. It was a debacle marked by inexperience, vanity and witlessness on both sides, and climaxed by the massacre of the British Light Brigade as a result of inexplicit orders.

In an effort to cram as much information as possible into a decent, two-hour running time, Mr. Richardson and Charles Wood, who wrote the screenplay, employ a kind of grapeshot movie technique.

They use marvelous, animated line drawings, done in the style of patriotic, mid-19th-century cartoons, to show the spirit of the times—the British lion's awakening to the challenge of the Russian bear, a busty Britannia saluting her brave sons.

There are short scenes that are almost blackouts to introduce Lord Cardigan (Trevor Howard), the ignorant, petty, slightly mad commander of the Light Brigade, and Lord Raglan (John Gielgud), the old commander-in-chief who literally works in the shadow of Wellington. (Raglan frets about a statue of the old general that stands outside his window awaiting assignment to "some suitable railroad station.")

There are odd, undeveloped scenes of life in the barracks and in the great country houses. Captain Nolan (David Hemmings), who was later to play a crucial part in the disaster of the Light Brigade at Balakiava, has a curious and (as far as the movie narrative is concerned) pointless affair with his best friend's wife (Vanessa Redgrave).

Like everyone else in the film, they seem to be Gilbert and Sullivan characters manqués. Because the point of view remains strictly that of the director, rather than that of any of the people in it, the movie simply charges along as a series of extravagant tableaux.

Mr. Richardson ("Tom Jones," "The Loved One," "Mademoiselle," etc.) is a heavy-handed political moralist and an eclectic movie stylist. But he is also such a facile director that he inevitably puts good people and things into his movies.

The performances are excellent. The costumes look like clothes washed and worn in a pre-detergent era.

The actual events leading up to the final charge are likely to be as confusing to the moviegoer as to the participants, but they are visually stunning, and the final impression of the movie—the silence on the body-littered battlefield broken by the buzzing of flies—is suddenly very personal, sad and even relevant.

"The Charge of the Light Brigade," which opened a reserved-seat engagement last-night at the Fine Arts Theater, is otherwise devoted to lampooning old soldiers who have already faded away. The reasons why are pretty well ignored. "It will be a sad day," says Lord Raglan, "when England has her armies commanded by men who know too well what they are doing. It smacks of murder."

This is high, entertaining dudgeon, but it's approximately 114 years late.